Doris Duke: The Richest Girl in the World

The heiress and onetime Harper's Bazaar contributor led a dramatic life — she sued her mother at 14, seduced countless men, and accidentally killed a close friend. She left behind $1.2 billion and many lavish homes, including her Hawaiian showcase, Shangri La, the focus of a new book and exhibit.

Doris Duke: The Richest Girl in the World

Doris Duke: The Richest Girl in the World

The heiress and onetime Harper's BAZAAR contributor led a dramatic life — she sued her mother at 14, seduced countless men, and accidentally killed a close friend. She left behind $1.2 billion and many lavish homes, including her Hawaiian showcase, Shangri La, the focus of a new book and exhibit.

Not a renowned diarist, Doris Duke preferred to reveal herself in the things she purchased. In 1947, the tobacco heiress, at the time considered the world's richest woman, bought another big-ticket item: Porfirio Rubirosa, the Dominican Don Juan, seducer of heiresses and screen sirens and owner of a famous anatomical advantage. (To this day, "Rubirosas" are what Parisian waiters call the giant pepper mills they carry from table to table.) When Duke met the Latin playboy, he was living in Switzerland with his second wife, the French movie star Danielle Darrieux. According to one of Duke's biographers, she paid Darrieux $1 million to divorce Rubirosa.

Eager to be useful amid the wreckage of World War II, Duke had recently moved to Paris, where she worked as a fashion writer for Harper's Bazaar at a salary of some $50 per week. Carmel Snow, the magazine's legendary editor, added some gloss to her edges and kept a motherly eye on her millions. Indeed, we may have Snow to thank for the fact that today the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation remains one of the nation's most generous supporters of the arts, environmental causes, and medical research. For when Duke announced her plans to marry Rubirosa, Snow, aware of his reputation as a fortune hunter, raced to help secure a prenup. On her wedding day, Duke wore an ankle-length green taffeta Dior chosen by her new mentor, and "a battery of legal talent was there to represent the interest in one of the largest fortunes in the world," Snow wrote later.

When the couple divorced the next year, Rubirosa walked away with an annual allowance equivalent to $250,000 today as long as he did not remarry, a coffee plantation, a string of polo ponies, several race cars, and a mansion in Paris. The pay-off was chump change by Duke standards; the real treasures lay thousands of miles away at Shangri La, her splendid Hawaiian estate. A paean to Islamic art and architecture, Shangri La is the subject of a new book and an exhibit opening at New York's Museum of Arts and Design this fall.

Like any self-respecting billionairess, when Duke died in 1993, in addition to chests heaped with rough diamonds, silos full of 18th-century French furniture, and vast sums of money in accounts across the globe—the dispensation of which was framed in a 45-page last will and testament that cost the estate well over $10 million in legal bills to disentangle--she left a lot of clothing. In closets at her Park Avenue penthouse; in the 105 rooms of Rough Point, her Newport mansion (where Duke entertained friends like Jacqueline Onassis and Elizabeth Taylor and where she housed Princess and Baby, the Bactrian camels given by Adnan Khashoggi); and in attics at her Falcon Lair estate in Beverly Hills, Duke had amassed an extraordinary collection of clothing, some 9,000 articles strong.

But hidden among the couture pieces by Balenciaga, Dior, and Givenchy, personally fitted on her by those midcentury masters, was a modest assortment of shoes. Unlike her old friend Imelda Marcos, for whom she had posted $5 million in bail when the former Philippine president's wife was indicted on racketeering charges in 1988, Duke had relatively few pairs, many of them silk harem flats made for her in the '60s by Taj of India. They were well-worn and bore the stigma of frequent repairs.

Those Indian slippers speak eloquently about their owner. Though born in a five-story mansion on Fifth Avenue, Duke grew up to be America's original haute bohemian. While her contemporaries Babe Paley and C.Z. Guest lunched at Le Pavillon, Duke was lounging like an odalisque on a lanai at Shangri La.

Back in the days of industrial monopolies, James Buchanan Duke, Doris's father, held as powerful a grip on the American tobacco industry as John D. Rockefeller did on its oil fields. Rockefeller may have been richer, but his fortune was spread thin. On the other hand, when Duke's father died in 1925, he left the bulk of his $80 million estate to his only child, 12-year-old Doris. Her inheritance (more than $1 billion in today's dollars) made her not only "the richest girl in the world" but also, in the days before MGM began minting movie stars, its most famous, a constant obsession of ravenous press and paparazzi. Even The New York Times was rapt: On the occasion of Duke's birth, the newspaper ruffled a few golden feathers by putting her at the top of a list of the world's wealthiest children, ahead of William K. Vanderbilt III and young John Jacob Astor VI, whose father had gone down with the Titanic a few months before he was born.

But Duke was reared in luxurious isolation, her bedroom hung with Gainsboroughs but smelling of ammonia. (Her father was fanatic about germs.) Tutored privately and shuttled around in her personal Rolls-Royce, Duke grew up lonely, pining for the love of her cold, materialistic mother. "I would look at the way she caressed her furs and diamonds," she once said about her mother, Nanaline Duke, "and wish she felt the same way about me."

Even as a child, Duke appeared to be plotting her escape. At 14, she successfully sued her mother for ownership of the Fifth Avenue mansion. Duke not only lacked her mother's social self-consciousness, she also courted scandal. According to several biographers, she was still on her honeymoon with James Cromwell, a Palm Beach bon vivant and aspiring politician, when she began having an affair with a pair of Hawaiian surfer brothers, Duke and Sam Kahanamoku.

Duke's 1935 marriage had released her at last from under her mother's thumb. The couple were wed at Duke's home, and the bride had the word obey removed from the marriage vows. On an 11-month round-the-world honeymoon, the new Mrs. Cromwell was frustrated by her husband's preference for the upper deck over their stateroom. "The more I believed there was to be no passion on my honeymoon," Duke said later, "the more I shopped." By the time the couple arrived in Honolulu, an armada of steamships carrying the spoils of her sprees was chugging toward New York.

It was also on this trip that Duke fell in love with Diamond Head, that glittering volcanic promontory near which, the next spring, she bought five acres overlooking the Pacific. Her plan to build Shangri La during the Great Depression made her only more famous. The newlyweds had not yet landed in Honolulu before the New York Post wrote, "American wealth, drawn from the tobacco fortune of the former Doris Duke and her husband, James Cromwell, has saved India's ancient art of marble-carving."

But her marriage was a sham, and Duke spent the late 1930s living unapologetically with Duke Kahanamoku at Shangri La while conducting simultaneous affairs with Errol Flynn in L.A. and an aristocratic MP in London. In 1940, she gave birth prematurely to her only child, a daughter named Arden, who died the next day.

After divorcing during World War II, Duke traveled first to Egypt to aid the war effort, organizing poker games at Cairo's Egyptian Club for the troops. Next she applied at the Office of Strategic Services (the precursor to the CIA), where she was hired as a spy and sent to Italy. But when the government withheld interesting assignments, she defected to Hearst's International News Service, writing dispatches from the Rome bureau. There was time for a brief affair with General George S. Patton on the Russian front before she moved to Paris to work for Bazaar.

As she aged, the scandals accrued. In 1966, Duke and her close friend Eduardo Tirella, an interior designer, were leaving Rough Point when Tirella left the car to open the property's iron gates. Duke told police she slid over to the driver's seat to take the wheel. The car lurched forward and struck Tirella before crashing into a tree. He was killed instantly, and though there were rumors that the pair had been arguing, the incident was ruled an accident. In 1985, Duke befriended an ex—Hare Krishna named Chandi Heffner, whom she ended up adopting, convinced that she was the reincarnation of her baby daughter. The relationship soured and Duke disowned her, but after Duke's death Heffner settled with the estate for $65 million. Then there was the notorious case of Bernard Lafferty, the inebriated, ponytailed butler who kept vigil at her bedside and to whom she left millions.

If people betrayed her, objects never did. Throughout the decades, she collected insatiably, and after she died, the public saw for the first time her extraordinary English and French furniture, Asian and Islamic art, rare wines, and gems. Though she never considered it a formal collection, the jewelry is especially impressive. Duke was drawn to Indian pieces, returning from her travels with strands of emeralds cut en cabochon. At home she discovered the redolence of the Mughal in designs by David Webb, like a collar bursting with rubies and pearls. Her prize piece, however, may have been the Cartier Belle Epoque diamond garland necklace that James Buchanan Duke purchased for her mother in 1908. At a 2004 auction at Christie's, it sold for $2.3 million—almost double the high estimate.

Yet of all her possessions, none was more precious than Shangri La. With unwavering purpose she chose each delicate marble screen, every panel inlaid with jade and malachite. Sometime in the '80s, a renowned art scholar visited the house and informed his hostess that the contents alone might be worth more than $1 billion. Duke later recalled, "I told him to stop counting."

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Pictured above: Duke had recently moved to Paris, where she worked for Harper's Bazaar at a salary of some $50 per week.